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A world of research at Oregon State UniversityFri, 27 Feb 2015 20:20:06 +0000en-UShourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=3.8.1A world of research at Oregon State UniversityTerra MagazinenoA world of research at Oregon State UniversityTerra Magazine » waterhttp://oregonstate.edu/terra/wp-content/plugins/powerpress/rss_default.jpghttp://oregonstate.edu/terra
New labs focus on stormwater, floodshttp://oregonstate.edu/terra/2014/10/new-labs-focus-on-stormwater-floods/
http://oregonstate.edu/terra/2014/10/new-labs-focus-on-stormwater-floods/#commentsWed, 15 Oct 2014 22:24:34 +0000http://oregonstate.edu/terra/?p=16106When floods arrive, hydrologists scramble. They run computer models to evaluate the need for evacuation. They gather data to understand impacts on fish, soils and water quality. Now, Oregon State researchers will have access to two new labs that enable them to test theories before the downpour.

A Multipurpose River Hydraulics Research Facility will be located at the O.H. Hinsdale Wave Research Lab. It includes a recirculating system and a concrete platform for independent, simultaneous experiments. Near Avery Park in Corvallis, the OSU-Benton County Green Stormwater Infrastructure Research Facility will offer three independent cells for testing water treatment technologies. Stormwater will be stored in underground tanks and pumped into the cells for experiments. Education and outreach activities will also be carried out at the lab.

Two OSU assistant engineering professors, Arturo Leon and Meghna Babbar-Sebens, will direct the River Hydraulics Lab and stormwater facility respectively. Oregon BEST, a statewide nonprofit research organization, has provided funding for both labs. Other support comes from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Oregon State University, the Oregon Water Resources Department, Benton County, Northwest Research Associates and the Pacific Northwest Transportation Consortium.

A Gumuz woman at market day in the Blue Nile region of Ethiopia. (Photos courtesy of Jennifer Veilleux)

BLUE NILE, Ethiopia – Can a massive dam on Ethiopia’s Blue Nile River become a “platform for peace” in the parched lands of Africa? Or will it instead spark new conflicts among neighboring nations? And what happens to the people whose homes will be submerged when the reservoir fills?

These are the kinds of questions Oregon State University Ph.D. student Jennifer Veilleux dug into during a five-month study along the African river where the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam is under construction. Working with OSU Professor Aaron Wolf, an international expert on water conflict resolution, she was investigating the human dimensions of the dam’s development and, more broadly, the complex intertwining among peoples and waters the world over.

“Water is needed and shared by every sector of human society and by dependent ecosystems,” says Veilleux, who finished her Ph.D. in geography in June. “Water shapes the physical and human landscape. I want to find out how this resource can be cooperatively shared by different communities.”

To tease out the dynamics of water sharing among countries and cultures, the researcher interviewed both urban and rural Ethiopians, spending time particularly with the Gumuz people, a little-studied subsistence culture found mainly along the Blue Nile in Ethiopia and Sudan. Most of the 20,000 local people who will be displaced by the dam project are Gumuz, artisanal gold miners who trade with nearby communities. From the river they draw not only material sustenance, but also their very identity as a people.

So Veilleux was surprised at the flexibility, resolve and general acceptance voiced by the people she interviewed — a finding that runs counter to prevailing predictions of worldwide water wars as Planet Earth heats up and human populations mount. “I think the people had a very keen sense of being river people, meaning they are very adamant about staying near the water because it’s their everything, their life,” she says. “But I was surprised at how flexible they were about moving.”

Averting Water Wars

Two years ago, the online newspaper Aljazeera ran a stark headline: Almost half of humanity will face water scarcity by 2030. Similar stories have splashed across the front pages of major newspapers for nearly 20 years, with many predicting global water wars.

As a powerful new force in the ancient, life-sustaining relationship between people and water, the African dam presents huge opportunities as well as grave challenges for Ethiopia. On one hand, it will provide reliable power. “Only about 40 percent of Ethiopia has electricity,” notes Veilleux, who manages the “transboundary freshwater dispute” database at OSU. “When complete, the massive, 6,000-megawatt dam will be the largest hydroelectric power plant in Africa, expanding electricity coverage in Ethiopia and neighboring countries.”

It’s also a source of pride for Ethiopians, who are eager to shed the perception of being a famine-prone country in need of international aid, rather than an African leader with a middle-class economy, says Veilleux. “Dams are really big power symbols, not just for their capacity to harness energy, but as symbols of modernity and identity,” she says.

Cultural Risks

But while the Ethiopian government has a comprehensive resettlement program for the Gumuz, Veilleux’s research raises many important, and as-yet unanswered, questions: What will replace gold as a new source of cash economy? How will farming change without seasonal flooding? Will malaria rates increase with a stagnant reservoir? How will the dam change native fish stocks and the equipment needed to catch them? How will the Gumuz stay connected to other villages when the now-navigable river becomes an expansive lake? Will moving to an urban area lead to increased social problems related to modern life, such as a loss of cultural identity?

“If the dam project is done correctly, the Ethiopian government can greatly improve some of the challenges that the Gumuz communities face from malnutrition, disease or lack of access to secondary or higher education,” the researcher says. “Resource sharing will also improve the lives of Ethiopians who benefit from expanded electricity.”

But the cultural costs should not be ignored, she cautions. People’s ancient connection to the river has led to deep understandings about natural resources in the region — understandings that social scientists call “traditional ecological knowledge” or TEK— that can and should be tapped for the benefit of all.

“More attention needs to be spent on identifying the strengths as well as the vulnerabilities of local communities, to buffer possible threats to these areas, and to make sure that the benefits outweigh the costs.”

–Story by Abby Metzger, OSU College of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences

]]>http://oregonstate.edu/terra/2014/09/seeking-the-headwaters-of-peace/feed/0Water Action Teamhttp://oregonstate.edu/terra/2014/09/water-action-team/
http://oregonstate.edu/terra/2014/09/water-action-team/#commentsWed, 24 Sep 2014 17:59:15 +0000http://oregonstate.edu/terra/?p=15718Oregon may have a reputation for an abundance of rain, but even in the lush Willamette Valley, water shortages are a growing concern. Sustainable water management is essential for maintaining productive agriculture, flood control and healthy stream habitats for fish. That’s why the Water Action Team —a volunteer group of the Corvallis Sustainability Coalition is committed to reducing local tap water use as well as wastewater and stormwater.

What’s their strategy? The team is embracing a multi-pronged approach that includes both infrastructure and behavior. Actions such as de-paving parking lots, defrosting meat overnight (instead of in running water), and installing rainwater catchment systems are all part of their plan for a 50 percent reduction of the water flow through Corvallis’s municipal water systems (based on 2008 annual levels) by the year 2050.

“People don’t think there’s a water problem here,” said Dave Eckert, the Water Action Team leader. But according to the Oregon Climate Change Research Institute, Oregon’s water resources are already seeing significant changes. Winter flooding is likely to result from more precipitation falling as rain instead of snow. In the summer, water shortages may become more frequent. Across the western U.S., the reality of a water crisis is even more severe, as many states confront wildfires and drought.

“[At the workshop] I asked a raise of hands of who had moved from Southern California, Arizona, New Mexico — all the dry states, and a bunch of hands sheepishly moved up,” Eckert said.

Even though Oregon faces water shortages too, Eckert thinks more “climate refugees” will be moving to this area as drought worsens in the Southwest. This trend reinforces the importance of sustainably managing our current water resources in order to brace the region for a growing population.

]]>http://oregonstate.edu/terra/2014/09/water-action-team/feed/0Peak Waterhttp://oregonstate.edu/terra/2013/10/peak-water/
http://oregonstate.edu/terra/2013/10/peak-water/#commentsThu, 10 Oct 2013 17:26:14 +0000http://oregonstate.edu/terra/?p=14528Oregon is warming, and snow is waning. The clear, clean water that supplies many of Oregon’s cities and farms originates high in the Cascades. Stored on snowy peaks, the water feeds rivers and aquifers that supply some of the state’s most populous regions.

In one key watershed, the McKenzie, snowpack is predicted to drop more than half by mid-century, OSU researchers project. This determination, based on a temperature increase just over 3.5 degrees Fahrenheit, could hold dire implications for similar “low-elevation maritime snow packs” across the globe. That’s because even small increases in temperature can flip precipitation from snow to rain.

“This is not an issue that will just affect Oregon,” says OSU researcher Anne Nolin, who co-authored the study with Ph.D. student Eric Sproles. “You may see similar impacts almost anywhere around the world that has low-elevation snow in mountains, such as in Japan, New Zealand, Northern California, the Andes Mountains, a lot of Eastern Europe and the lower-elevation Alps.”

]]>http://oregonstate.edu/terra/2013/10/peak-water/feed/0Far and Awayhttp://oregonstate.edu/terra/2012/10/far-and-away/
http://oregonstate.edu/terra/2012/10/far-and-away/#commentsFri, 12 Oct 2012 18:00:27 +0000http://oregonstate.edu/terra/?p=11579When you play fetch with a killer whale, it makes an impression. When you play fetch with a killer whale and you’re only 7 years old, it can change your life. For Renee Albertson, the change was a long time in the making. But as she tried first one career and then another, she never forgot how it felt to look into that whale’s eyes one rainy day in Vancouver, B.C. — a species-to-species connection that eventually led her to Oregon State’s Marine Mammal Institute and expeditions to study whales and dolphins around the world. Her summer on the turquoise seas of French Polynesia was just her most recent research adventure.

Meanwhile, other Oregon State students were at work in equally exotic places around the planet, from Kenya to New Zealand to the countryside of France. They worked on projects as diverse as engineering water systems and experimenting with emulsifiers in ice cream. Here’s a sampling of stories from these intrepid student researchers around the globe.

Zachary Dunn, a student in ecological engineering, coordinated a trip by OSU students to Kenya. (Photo: Lee Sherman)

How far would you go to help someone get a glass of clean water? Zachary Dunn knows exactly how far he’d go: 9,000 miles. And that’s just one trip, one way. By summer’s end, Dunn and fellow Oregon State University students had traveled almost 36,000 miles — greater than the Earth’s circumference — to help bring drinkable water to Lela, a tiny farming community in Kenya.

So why would engineering students fly halfway around the planet from bucolic Oregon to struggling East Africa, not once but twice? Why would Dunn say that contracting malaria on his first trip was a “small price to pay”? Why would he shrug off a State Department travel warning about terrorism and piracy in the region?

“In Lela, women and children walk up to three miles a day carrying 40-pound buckets of water,” explains Dunn, who grew up in Albany, Oregon. “I’ve seen kids as young as five with buckets on their heads. It’s a feat. They don’t complain. But the loss to productivity and education is huge.”

It’s not despite the chasm between the Kenyan village (where waterborne disease is common) and his Oregon hometown (where pure water flows from faucets and fountains at the twist of a wrist) but because of it that Dunn joined the OSU project in 2010 to survey water sources, test water quality and commission a groundwater survey. He and a student team headed back to Lela in July to help spearhead drilling a well and installing a rainwater catchment system.

“We all have a common fate,” says Dunn. “These kinds of projects can help shape the future of the world. It benefits all of us. It’s a win-win.”

During the dry season, women and children in Lela walk about three miles to get clean drinking water in a nearby town. (Photo: EWB-USA, Oregon State University)

That all-embracing, planetary vision is what led to Dunn’s participation in OSU’s chapter of Engineers Without Borders USA (EWB-USA), which is dedicated to the vision of a world in which all communities have the capacity to meet their basic human needs. And it’s that vision that steered him to the Ecological Engineering program for his undergraduate work. The program, he says, is based on “systems theory,” the notion that everything is connected and, thus, solutions must be holistic.

“I’m interested in redefining the relationship between humans and the planet,” says Dunn, who describes himself as a “born tinkerer,” always tilting toward problem solving even in childhood.

The Lela Women’s Water Committee linked up with EWB-USA when they were looking for a partner on their quest for a better life. “We only partner with communities that have identified a need and have asked for help,” says Dunn, who will start graduate studies in public policy this fall.

The other EWB-USA requirement: The project must be sustainable. “A huge number of wells in Africa are in disrepair,” Dunn notes. “Many communities do not have the capacity to maintain them.”

That’s why EWB-OSU’s team of six (five students and one professional mentor) recommended a hand pump for Lela’s new well. Other power-source options, such as diesel or solar, cost too much to maintain or are targets for theft. With guidance from faculty and a groundwater expert from engineering firm CH2M Hill, the students have researched everything from the compressive strength of concrete (for the foundations under rainwater storage tanks) to the reliability and availability of pumps.

Zach Dunn celebrated with members of the women's water committee in Lela, Kenya, after completing a water project for the community. (Photo: Justin Smith)

In Kenya, Dunn and his team stay in a “simba,” a house made of wood and mud with a corrugated metal roof, on the land owned by village elder Charles Olang’o. The elder’s son Paul is the translator for the Oregon State engineers. A fast friendship has formed among the Kenyans and the students.

“We have a really special bond with Lela,” Dunn says. “Charles calls me his son; Paul calls me his brother. They are very gracious people.”

]]>http://oregonstate.edu/terra/2012/06/pumped-up/feed/1Hydro-deja vu: 50 Years of Water Resources Research at OSUhttp://oregonstate.edu/terra/2011/09/hydro-deja-vu-50-years-of-water-resources-research-at-osu/
http://oregonstate.edu/terra/2011/09/hydro-deja-vu-50-years-of-water-resources-research-at-osu/#commentsThu, 15 Sep 2011 00:41:24 +0000http://oregonstate.edu/terra/?p=7980“Abundant, good water is essential to continued economic growth and progress. The Congress has found that we have entered a period in which acute water shortages are hampering our industries, our agriculture, our recreation, and our individual health and happiness.”

Waterfall in the Oregon Cascades (Photo: Matt Betts)

If this announcement sounds like it just sprang out of the mouth of someone campaigning for climate change funding through Congress, consider that it was a statement by President Lyndon B. Johnson as he announced the approval of the Water Resources Research Act of 1964, thus officially creating a network of water resource research institutes at land grant universities across the United States. Indeed, Oregon had already established a water resources research in 1961. Through the pioneering efforts of several professors including Emery Castle, F.J. Burgess, J.T. Krygier, and C.E. Warren, the Water Resources Research Institute (WRRI) at Oregon State University was authorized by the Oregon State Board of Higher Education. Whether Oregon’s WRRI is the oldest in the US is the subject of debate; Utah State University publicly claims this honor. Regardless of this claim to fame, Oregon’s center is one of the first in the nation and is this year celebrating 50 years of continuous operation from its headquarters in Strand Agricultural Hall.

Emery Castle, the first director of OSU's water research center, 1961-1969. (Photo courtesy of Todd Jarvis, OSU Institute for Water and Watersheds)

The 1964 legislation was a tribute to the vision and wisdom of Senator Clinton P. Anderson of New Mexico. Looking forward from the water use and management at that time, it was predicted that by the year 2000 there would not be enough usable water to meet the water requirements of parts of 30 states, including water-wet Oregon.

The Water Resource Research Act (WRRA) was based on the highly successful Hatch Act of 1887, which created the state agricultural experiment stations system. The Anderson bill was prescient and varied slightly from the Hatch Act in that the water centers were designed to be college-wide, or university-wide, to assure participation of all disciplines available in water research.

Statewide Support for Water Research

The Oregon Water Resources Research Institute (OWRRI) was one of the 54 water institutes located at land grant universities across the United States that received a small federal grant to provide base support for water resources research needs in each state. “Many faculty in the Oregon University System, as well as nearby privates schools, got their start through the mini-grant program administered through the Water Resources Research Act” according to IWW Interim Director Todd Jarvis. The list of grant recipients as the OWRRI matured with changes in missions, and as the federal WRRA was amended, to the Oregon Water Research Institute (OWRI), the Center for Water and Environmental Sustainability (CWest), and the Institute for Water and Watersheds (IWW) reads like the Who’s Who of water in Oregon and the west. For example, Law Professor Chapin Clark of the University of Oregon was provided funding nearly 40 years ago and Law Professor James Huffman from Lewis and Clark College was provided funding 30 years ago. IWW’s mission now is to facilitate research in water in Oregon through newsletters and water quality lab services. An annual seminar series has been sponsored by the OSU water center since 1964. A review of the seminar topics over the years, such as “Conflicts over the Columbia River” sponsored 20 years ago, are as relevant now as they were then.

This stream high in the Hinkle Creek watershed of the Oregon Cascades has provided scientists with data on forest harvesting and water quality. (Photo: Kelly James)

In a 1964 speech introducing the Anderson water resources research bill, Senate staffer Benton J. Strong, indicated that “… if the Anderson water resources research bill is as successful as the Hatch Act has been in agriculture, 75 years from now we will have only one remaining water problem — floods. Our cups, or reservoirs, like our grain bins, will ‘runneth over.’” According to IWW Director Jeff McDonnell, the irony regarding this statement is that according to the early results of the NSF-funded Willamette Water 2100 project, flooding may indeed create new forms of water scarcity in the summertime in the Willamette River Basin where conservative dam management operations to control for late winter and early spring floods may result in incomplete filling of reservoirs for summer water use.

The Institute for Water and Watersheds (IWW) continues the rich tradition of linking OSU and other researchers within the Oregon University System to water issues in Oregon. A short documentary film with interviews with all of the previous directors, save one who passed away, as well as the current Chief of External Research with the US Geological Survey who received his Ph.D. in resource economics from OSU, will be available on the Institute for Water and Watersheds website just in time for the 50th Anniversary Water New Year Party, planned for Friday, September 30, 2011.

CORVALLIS, Ore. – The soils in large areas of the Southern Hemisphere, including major portions of Australia, Africa and South America, have been drying up in the past decade, a group of researchers conclude in the first major study to ever examine “evapotranspiration” on a global basis.

Most climate models have suggested that evapotranspiration, which is the movement of water from the land to the atmosphere, would increase with global warming. The new research, published online this week in the journal Nature, found that’s exactly what was happening from 1982 to the late 1990s.

But in 1998, this significant increase in evapotranspiration – which had been seven millimeters per year – slowed dramatically or stopped. In large portions of the world, soils are now becoming drier than they used to be, releasing less water and offsetting some moisture increases elsewhere.

Due to the limited number of decades for which data are available, scientists say they can’t be sure whether this is a natural variability or part of a longer-lasting global change. But one possibility is that on a global level, a limit to the acceleration of the hydrological cycle on land has already been reached.

If that’s the case, the consequences could be serious.

They could include reduced terrestrial vegetation growth, less carbon absorption, a loss of the natural cooling mechanism provided by evapotranspiration, more heating of the land surface, more intense heat waves and a “feedback loop” that could intensify global warming.

“This is the first time we’ve ever been able to compile observations such as this for a global analysis,” said Beverly Law, a professor of global change forest science at Oregon State University. Law is co-author of the study and science director of the AmeriFlux network of 100 research sites, which is one major part of the FLUXNET synthesis that incorporates data from around the world.

“We didn’t expect to see this shift in evapotranspiration over such a large area of the Southern Hemisphere,” Law said. “It is critical to continue such long-term observations, because until we monitor this for a longer period of time, we can’t be sure why this is occurring.”

Some of the areas with the most severe drying include southeast Africa, much of Australia, central India, large parts of South America, and some of Indonesia. Most of these regions are historically dry, but some are actually tropical rain forests.

The rather abrupt change from increased global evapotranspiration to a near halt in this process coincided with a major El Nino event in 1998, the researchers note in their report, but they are not suggesting that is a causative mechanism for a phenomenon that has been going on for more than a decade now.

Greater evapotranspiration was expected with global warming, because of increased evaporation of water from the ocean and more precipitation overall. And data indeed show that some areas are wetter than they used to be.

However, other huge areas are now drying out, the study showed. This could lead to increased drought stress on vegetation and less overall productivity, Law said, and as a result less carbon absorbed, less cooling through evapotranspiration, and more frequent or extreme heat waves.

Some of the sites used in this study are operated by Law’s research group in the central Oregon Cascade Range in the Metolius River watershed, and they are consistent with some of these concerns. In the last decade there have been multiple years of drought, vegetative stress, and some significant forest fires in that area.

Evapotranspiration returns about 60 percent of annual precipitation back to the atmosphere, in the process using more than half of the solar energy absorbed by land surfaces. This is a key component of the global climate system, linking the cycling of water with energy and carbon cycles.

Longer term observations will be needed to determine if these changes are part of decadal-scale variability or a longer-term shift in global climate, the researchers said.

This study was authored by a large group of international scientists, including from OSU; lead author Martin Jung from the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry in Germany; and researchers from the Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science in Switzerland, Princeton University, the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado, Harvard University, and other groups and agencies.

The regional networks, such as AmeriFlux, CarboEurope, and the FLUXNET synthesis effort, have been supported by numerous funding agencies around the world, including the Department of Energy, NASA, National Science Foundation, and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in the United States.

About the OSU College of Forestry: For a century, the College of Forestry has been a world class center of teaching, learning and research. It offers graduate and undergraduate degree programs in sustaining ecosystems, managing forests and manufacturing wood products; conducts basic and applied research on the nature and use of forests; and operates 14,000 acres of college forests.

The next time you sip a glass of spring water, consider this: Before it got to your lips, that water was soaking through soil, creeping along basalt crevices or flowing through porous volcanic rock. It nurtured microbes, carried dissolved minerals and may have spread the byproducts of human activities. Its pivotal role in the environment has made groundwater a headline topic in human health, waste management and water supplies for growing communities.

One number — 924 million — indicates how vital groundwater is to Oregon. That’s the number of gallons that the U.S. Geological Survey estimates were pumped from Oregon’s aquifers on an average day in 2000. More than 80 percent went to agriculture, most for irrigation.

Large as that number is, it barely begins to tell the story. It is in the subsurface — difficult to see or measure — where the groundwater drama unfolds, and where water availability and purity are subject to the vagaries of geology. Here, uncertainty is a fact of life. And that’s where OSU mathematicians are focusing their efforts to improve the models — equations translated into software code — that help water managers predict the behavior of this unseen resource.

“We really don’t know what’s in the subsurface, and we never will know,” says Malgorzata Peszynska, associate professor in the Department of Mathematics. “You can run seismic waves through it and get a relative idea of how one layer is related to another layer. You can drill observation wells and collect data, but you still don’t know.”

Born and raised in Warsaw, Poland, Peszynska has been working to improve subsurface models for almost two decades. Her love of math goes back to her youth. Undaunted by the teacher who told her there was no future in mathematics for a woman, she received a Ph.D. in the subject at the University of Augsburg in Germany. Her dissertation focused on mathematical techniques for describing liquid flow through porous materials.

In 1994, an invitation to work with one of the field’s leading lights, Jim Douglas Jr. at Purdue, brought her to the United States. Before joining the OSU math department in 2003, she conducted research with Mary F. Wheeler at one of the nation’s leading centers for subsurface modeling, the Institute for Computational Engineering and Science at the University of Texas.

Now, with grants from the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation, she is working with students, postdoctoral researcher Son-Young Yi and co-principle investigator and math department chair Ralph Showalter to refine mathematical methods and develop new approaches for simulating groundwater flow.

The researchers are focusing on numerical and computer models. It goes without saying that these sets of equations are complex. They include terms for the velocity of water movement, the porosity and permeability of rock layers and the pressure exerted by water percolating into an aquifer from mountain ridges and other high places.

By simulating water flow through these systems, models can provide insight into how much water is available for human uses and other purposes, but complexity carries a cost. It can add days or weeks to computing time, even on today’s fast computers, such as OSU’s 73-dual-processor SWARM machine in the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

So the research team’s goal is to develop techniques that can achieve higher accuracy and run in less time. One approach is to simplify details that, in the final analysis, are marginal. That is, they don’t make the model significantly more accurate. The result is what researchers call an “upscaled” model.

“For example,” Peszynska says, “in fractured materials (bedrock), we know there are periodic structures separating blocks of clay (or other impervious materials). Instead of trying to simulate the flow at this scale, we try to come up with an upscaled model of this kind of phenomenon.” The goal is a solution that is close to the original model but does not require as much computational power.

Another goal is to link models that operate at one level — water movement through sand grains, for example — to those that work over a broader scale, such as an entire watershed from mountain ridge to valley floor.

“The use of models that are suitable for laboratory experiments to describe processes on the scale of a watershed will bring any computer to its knees,” says Showalter. “We’re trying to connect information at the microscale to the big picture, and for that we need new mathematical systems that at least give the computers a chance.”

Other OSU faculty members are working on related problems. In the Department of Civil, Construction and Environmental Engineering, Dorthe Wildenschild conducts experiments to understand how fluids behave in the spaces between sand grains. She and Ph.D. student Mark Porter use high-performance X-ray tomography at the Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois to see how air mixes with drops of oil and water in such tight quarters. The speed of these interactions is a critical factor in treating groundwater contaminated by toxic chemicals.

Meanwhile, the speed of model simulation is a factor in the research. “We fly out to Chicago and do the pore-scale experiments in three to four days,” says Wildenschild. “It takes Porter several months to run an equivalent simulation at that small scale on the high-performance computer (SWARM) here on campus.”

In the same department, Brian Wood has worked with Peszynska, Showalter, Enrique Thomann and Ed Waymire in math to characterize groundwater flow in porous materials. Wood focuses on the application of upscaling to the subsurface and to engineered porous systems such as chemical reactors, bioreactors in wastewater plants and sand filters used to clean drinking water. Wildenschild, Wood and other OSU engineers are also collaborating with scientists at the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Lab in Richland, Washington.

The OSU research couldn’t come at a better time. The need for better models is growing, says Michael Campana, a hydrogeologist and director of OSU’s Institute for Water and Watersheds. Officials who manage water supplies in places such as Oregon’s Klamath, Umatilla and Willamette basins, need to predict availability as demand grows and climate conditions change.

Models are useful approximations of the real world, says Campana, but “uncertainty can stem from the data or from imperfections in the model. It’s a real problem, and it’s getting worse. People are using models to look further into the future. Water managers are increasingly asking what a changing climate will mean for their water resources in 50 years or more. If we give them a number and tell them it could be 30 percent more or less, that’s not good enough.”

In small Moroccan villages, tea and food accompany discussion. The topic here was water use. OSU water specialist Aaron Wolf (second from left) interviewed Hammou Magdoul (left), a farmer in Ameskar el-Fouqani, with help from his interpreter, Mohamed Zaki (right). (Photo courtesy of Aaron Wolf)

In the summer of 1997, Aaron Wolf and a Berber guide trekked up narrow mountain paths to a village high in the Atlas Mountains of Morocco. Despite the steep terrain, they walked lightly. A donkey carried their gear. As they moved toward snowcapped peaks, they crossed one dry, rocky ridge after another. It took four days for them to reach the M’Goun Valley, elevation 7,000 feet. Their destination was two villages: Ameskar el-Fouqani (upper) and Ameskar al-Tahtani (lower), two communities of mud and stone buildings set among irrigated hillside terraces.

Terra Up Close

Western water: from dispute to agreement

Water in the West has long been a trigger for disputes. Witness Colorado River diversions in California and Arizona and struggles in Oregon’s Klamath basin. But cooperation is still the rule, according to research by master’s student Kristel Fesler and a team of OSU students in the Dept. of Geosciences.

In a project funded by the federal Bureau of Reclamation, they have found that water-related events (newspaper reports) in the Colorado and Rio Grande basins more often reflect cooperation than conflict. In earlier research in Oregon, Fesler found that 65 percent of 384 water-related events between 1990 and 2004 were cooperative or neutral.

The strongest common thread among those involving conflict is government decisions such as new regulations. The lesson: agencies should foster productive, ongoing relationships with stakeholders and anticipate reactions to new regulations. A native of Minneapolis, Minnesota, Fesler worked with OSU professors Julia Jones and Aaron Wolf.

The small spring-fed stream that flows through the villages is vital to the hundred or so families who live here. It serves their homes, powers a grain mill and waters crops and gardens. There is just enough water to meet their needs, but people have arranged to share the stream, doing in a microcosm what nations that divide rivers, lakes and groundwater aquifers do on a grand scale. It was a desire to learn about how a village manages competing demands — through rules that have ancient origins, predating 20th-century European colonization and the rise of an independent Moroccan government — that brought Wolf to this part of the world.

Arid communities with strong links to the past have useful lessons for a thirsty planet, believes Wolf, a water resources specialist and professor in the OSU Department of Geosciences. Traditional arrangements hold practical advice for countries with growing populations and increasing development pressures.

Funded by a grant from the U.S. Institute of Peace, Wolf’s visits to the Berber villages and later to the Bedouin camps of Israel’s Negev Desert documented rules that have worked successfully for centuries. For example, arrangements to share water are often based on time instead of amount. (In one case, families set their irrigation schedules according to when a mountain shadow crosses a stream.) This principle equitably distributes the risk of low-flow conditions during drought years. More typical throughout the world, including the United States, is allocation by volume, which allows some water users to have priority, regardless of how much is available from year to year. In case of drought, other users must do with less or go without.

In Berber communities, water irrigation intakes may be built with stones but not with concrete, guaranteeing a flow of water to downstream users. Following Islamic law, people in both societies do not sell water. Access for drinking is a fundamental right, although making use of canals, pipes and other infrastructure may carry a price tag.

When disagreements occur, they are brought before a locally appointed judge. Enforcement can be swift, Wolf recalls being told. Asked about how long one party to a dispute had to agree to a judge’s decision, the judge replied by wetting his finger and holding it in the wind. “He said that if there was not agreement by the time his finger was dry, he would see to it that the man’s house would be burned to the ground,” Wolf says.

Politics and Databases

Wolf has built a career around assembling global water-related information and expertise, watershed by watershed. In his Ph.D. work at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, he focused on the Jordan River Basin in the Middle East, applying the theory of alternative dispute resolution to create a framework for decision-making. Water, he says, may be the single most important focus for continuing dialogue among Israelis, Palestinians, Jordanians and other groups.

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Water Research for Oregon

Umatilla basin groundwater, Upper Klamath Lake wetlands, Willamette River flow requirements, water quality in the Deschutes River basin — these are some of the subjects under study in OSU’s Institute for Water and Watersheds.

Under the leadership of Director Michael E. Campana, the IWW coordinates water-related teaching and research and applies OSU expertise to the water resources needs of Oregon citizens. More than 80 OSU faculty members in six OSU colleges conduct water-related research, supported by more than $11 million in annual grant funding.

“If you just talk about the politics, you end up banging your head against the wall. There is no way to move. Every word has 5,000 years of meaning,” says Wolf. “But if you think about the things that are related to this (water), you can find other ways to talk. . . . In my dissertation I set out to capture how water had played a role in the Arab-Israeli conflict over time. And found much to my surprise, because it wasn’t in the literature, there is a rich, rich history of cooperation and dialogue.”

Despite the breakdown of the peace process, he says, multilateral discussions about water continue to this day. The issue is one of personal interest to Wolf who, as a dual Israeli-U.S. citizen, was drafted and served as a paratrooper in the Israeli Defense Forces from 1986 to 1988. That experience, described in his book, A Purity of Arms, instilled in him a deep desire for finding ways to resolve conflict through peaceful means.

In addition to the Jordan, he has worked with organizations to improve management on the Columbia River in the Pacific Northwest, the Salween in Southeast Asia and southern Africa’s Okavango, the “jewel of the Kalahari.” Around the world, the stakes couldn’t be higher. Water development projects are key to social and economic progress, affecting agriculture, energy production, social relations and public health. Inadequate investment already has a staggering cost. The United Nations estimates that more than 1 billion people lack access to clean drinking water and that up to 5 million people, mostly children, die annually of water-related diseases. Some observers have suggested that water wars will haunt the future. “Water supplies are falling while the demand is dramatically growing,” warned Koichiro Matsuura, director general of UNESCO, in 2005.

While Wolf sees access to clean water as a formidable unmet challenge, he disagrees that water disputes will inevitably escalate into wars. It’s not that tension and conflict are absent from water management, he says. Rather, research by him and his students has found that cooperation over water — the kind of traditions exhibited by the Berbers and the Bedouins — is far more common than violence. In scouring historical records and cataloging modern decisions, they have found reference to only one “water war,” which occurred in the Tigris-Euphrates basin about 4,500 years ago. In the last 50 years, nations have signed 400 water-related treaties while 37 disputes involved violence, 27 of those between Israel and its neighbors.

In fact, their research suggests that, far from being an inducement to war, water management can be a pathway to peace. Cooperation over some of the world’s largest rivers — the Nile, the Mekong, the Indus — has succeeded in the face of ongoing hostilities and contributed to productive relationships that make violence less likely.

Building the basis for those relationships, however, is hard work. Wolf and his colleagues have made a start. At OSU, where he is affiliated with the Institute of Water and Watersheds (IWW), Wolf spearheaded creation of the Transboundary Freshwater Dispute Database (www.transboundarywaters.orst.edu), an online library of agreements, case studies and events around the world. It includes maps showing the physical, social and economic circumstances that guide water-related decisions in Asia, Africa, Europe, and North and South America. OSU faculty members in the Northwest Alliance for Computational Science and Engineering (www.nacse.org) built the digital engine that drives the database.

To people struggling with water-related disputes, the database provides invaluable tools. “No matter where you work, people always think they are the only ones facing these issues. Water pollution, upstream/downstream relations, water rights. They’re so relieved just to hear that other people have tackled them,” Wolf says.

“There’s no blueprint for solving conflicts from one basin to another. There are best practices. We’ve done a pretty good job of assembling them. And there are lessons — trends — where basins evolve over time through stages.”

To help people apply those lessons and develop their own practices, Wolf helps to lead a group known as the Universities Partnership for Transboundary Waters. Currently, it includes experts from 14 universities on five continents. “People are grappling with these issues all over, and I want to see continued interaction between Oregon and the rest of the world. We have a lot to teach, and we’ve got some stuff to learn. I think it’s useful to foster a sense of community around this,” Wolf adds.

A recent example of such community-building endeavors focused on Africa. Together with colleagues at the African Water Issues Research Unit at the University of Pretoria in South Africa, Wolf produced an assessment of hydrologic risks and institutional abilities to address them in the continent’s 63 international river basins. The United Nations Environment Programme published their report in 2005, the first of five such continental-scale analyses.

That report has given a boost to people working on water resources management, says co-author Anthony Turton of the University of Pretoria. He credits Wolf with shifting the world’s attention from water as a source of conflict to one of cooperation, with particular relevance for Africa. “I am grateful that he (Wolf) gave Africa a voice,” says Turton. “His project allowed us to speak on behalf of Africa and present some facts with which to counter the prevailing ‘Afropessimism.’ For that, many Africans are grateful.”

“Hydropolitical Resilience”

Key to the ability of countries to cooperate over water problems is a concept that is central to research by Wolf and his colleagues — “hydropolitical resilience.” The term refers to the expertise and resources that organizations need to adapt to changing environmental and social conditions. Countries need both the technical know-how — engineers, scientists, experts in public health and natural resources policy — and ways to integrate the views of people whose lives are at stake — farmers, fishermen and business people. Among these parties, skilled facilitators play a crucial role by guiding negotiations that can be contentious.

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Maps

Water stress — a measure of water availability in relation to population density — is already severe in some parts of the world. In these maps of the Middle East produced by Nathan Eidem, a graduate student in the OSU Department of Geosciences, see how water stress varies across the region.

To meet these needs, Wolf and his colleagues are building on OSU’s legacy of expertise in water science and engineering. The Water Resources graduate program offers students science, engineering and policy tracks. And a new program in Water Conflict Management and Transformation includes a graduate-level professional certificate for people to be trained in the principles and practices of conflict resolution.

“When you ask people in the water field what skills they wish they had more of, (they point to) how you dialogue, how you listen, how you identify common interests. Technical people are very good in many places, but they need people who can run these processes more efficiently,” says Wolf. “I see us being a training ground for anyone working in water.”

He also sees Oregon’s water management experience as a model for others. “Our watershed councils are doing cutting-edge work in terms of local management and local participation. Power really is vested in the local community.” With funds from the U.S. Geological Survey and IWW, Wolf and OSU sociologist Denise Lach are documenting the successes of Oregon’s local councils in resolving conflicts.

Respecting local knowledge and values can make all the difference, he adds, in the midst of a competition for resources. “You see it a lot in native systems. There’s a balance of equity and honor. In a Bedouin land court, I heard a judge tell someone (who won a case), ‘You’re right, but he (his opponent) still needs a livelihood for his family. Can we think of a way to make sure he still has his minimum needs taken care of?’”

Water management, Wolf and his colleagues stress, is conflict management.